Quote:
Originally Posted by LMich
Apart from the loss of historic structures is the loss of the street grid and just the general urban fabric of the inner-city.
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The street grid isn't really a big deal IMO. Madison, Swan, Eagle and State/Washington allows traffic to flow correctly around the Plaza (my observations of a few days in total driving around Albany...) The only "missing" streets are the smaller, neighborhood-level streets that would've been continuing (and that you can see on both sides of the Plaza: Hamilton, Hudson, etc.) but that through traffic wouldn't have been using anyway. It would've been local traffic only... for the rowhouses now gone.
The Plaza is actually a smaller hole in the street grid fabric than nearby Washington Park, and more or less on par with Lincoln Park. And no one says that breaking up the continous character and regularity of the street pattern is a valid reproach to make concerning the parks... (Would you even dream of saying that about NYC's Central Park?)
If you consider the whole thing (Plaza + Capitol) as the seat of the state govt, it's not abnormal that its very existence will be having an impact on the urban fabric of the city core, regardless of how it's done.
Unless you think it's preferable for the city to have all those white collars and their mini-Brasilia (or whatever the setup is for their office space, but in any case, it's going to occupy quite a bit of land) located far away from downtown...?